Bear Grylls and his crew stumble across human bones, the remains of fires and whale-bone tools on a remote Canadian island

This eerie image of an ancient bristlecone pine set against the backdrop of the Milky Way while a meteor streaked across the night sky has won the National Maritime Museum's annual astronomy photographic competition.

It was a characteristically modest and exact description; Richard Walker knew better than anyone the art of cataloguing, describing what he saw economically and precisely, yet evoking the picture as vividly as if you could see it.

A campaign aims to boost young people's knowledge of important facts through song. But will it work, asks Warwick Mansell

History has it that a clockmaker beat the scientific establishment to crack the longitude problem. But did he really?

In the War Office there were a lot of old fossils. But the one who was the real fossil was Claud William Wright. He was not only a senior administrative civil servant, and when transferred to the Ministry of Education the first Permanent Secretary, in effect, to Lord Eccles' Ministry of the Arts under Margaret Thatcher, but also from an early age, a leading geologist, palaeontologist and archaeologist.

Today: Throw light on the towers that protect ships from hazardous coastlines: the National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth opens an exhibition entitled "Lighthouses: Life on the Rocks". Running for two years, it will display a four-ton optic, reconstructed living quarters, artefacts, photos and narratives (nmmc.co.uk).

Sound sets the scene. When you pass through the doors, you are assailed by the bone-chilling noise of howling winds, and the crepitation of ice. Welcome to an exhibition about the fabled North-West Passage, a source of endless, greed-driven fascination, and often fruitless and tragic endeavour, for centuries. Was it somehow possible to travel by sea from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific, passing through the ice-bound waters of Alaska? Many tried. Many perished. John Cabot, sailing in 1497, believed that it would give him access to the fabled riches of the Far East. There then followed five hundred years of failure. Yes, it was not until 1906 that a Norwegian called Roald Amundsen achieved the near impossible, threading his way through, quite modestly, in a small herring boat.

Hadrian's Wall and the National Maritime Museum have secured £9m funding, the Heritage Lottery Fund announced today.

The Cutty Sark has been saved after a £3.3m donation by a reclusive shipping magnate. Sammy Ofer, a Romanian-born Israeli who served with the Royal Navy as a young man, has provided enough money to ensure the full renovation of the 1869 clipper in Greenwich, south-east London.

Cast adrift on a sea of old ideas

A Romanian-Israeli shipping magnate has donated £20m to the National Maritime Museum in what is believed to be the largest single donation by an individual to a cultural project in Britain.

An Israeli shipping magnate who served in the Royal Navy has given £20 million to the National Maritime Museum, it was announced today.

THE FLOTILLA left Falmouth in a squall. Five miles out at sea, just beyond the manacles, beside the pyramidal hulk of HMS Severn, the weather was clearing and a single sail reached into the blue sky from a giant trimaran. It was heading for home.